To the Poles!

I knocked on her door at 11AM and being her day off she was still sleeping. I let her go back to bed and took a nap myself (a long week in NYC and six hours of jetlag - not even sleeping pills can cure that...). An hour and a half lter she knocks on my door (I lucked out: she had an extra room!) and invites me to take a short train ride out of Dublin to Howth, a small outcropping of land to the northeast of Dublin, with her and her friends for a little hiking on the coast. We walk to her friends', a group of Polish boys all around our age, where Voyt, the most outgoing towards me of the group, tells me of how at some god-awful hour in the morning they were trying to sober up/kick the impending hangover. They decided to paint the common area of their flat. That was their solution. Just imagine a group of shitfaced 20something Polish guys painting their communal common room with the sun coming up outside!... 'How do you think it looks?' he asks me. I must say, they did a pretty good job. It was about one or two in the afternoon and these fellows were already breaking out the Scotch. At this point I knew these kids were obviously a wild bunch, but what I didn't quite expect was that these were to be some of the most loving, affectionate and all around wonderful people I've met. They come from an area in the South of Poland that is very industrial, working class with a lot of mining. There was a whole grip of them, Voytek and Mytek being the ones I talked to most as their english was best and they were the more outgoing ones. So, we make to Howth at around 3 or 4 and it's a beautiful hike with some cliffs and a lighthouse on the coast... yeah yeah, very stereotypically Irish, but beautiful nonetheless.

And as is also very Irish, the rains come down in torrents rather unexpectedly. We're pretty deep into the hike, so we huddle under a nearby copse of trees and finish the whiskey and drink a bottle of wine to try to wait it out. I was reminded of Bothell, huddling in the woods in the rain and drinking... these are my kind of people. After about 40 minutes the booze is gone and the rain is still very present. At this point the drink is normalizing my sort of spacey delirium of jetlag and exhaustion. After a while we realize the rain won't let up and we walk a little ways and catch a bus back to the city center. On the bus we drink another bottle of wine procured at a local shop, obscuring the bottle with a hat for the sake of the camera staring at us from the front of the bus. We get back to the boys' flat and I realize that there's even more Polish in this building, practically a little community of them. We all change clothes and they generously offer me pants, a shirt, shoes... everything really, but I was the most prepared and only needed a pair of socks which were generously offered up in haste.

The plan for the night was to go to a dinner party at Voytek's older brother's girlfiend's flat in Dublin 4 (we've been in Dublin 2 this whole time). I always heard that the Polish had a reputation for being hard workers and hard drinkers and they didn't dissapoint. These kids can drink, and it's a different kind of drinking than I'm used to with friends. There's always a round of shots ready and waiting to slip down the collective throat and they never had to wait very long. I'm pround to say I could keep up, but kept an eye on myself being all too fully aware of my physical state and the forethought of catching a plane the next morning.

The dinner was a spagetthi with meatchunks and was almost as phenominal as the conversation. I didn't want the night to end, talking with people all around the world; Gael the Norman Frenchman, Inez, his beautiful Spanish girlfriend, the Brazilian girl was a darling, though I unfortunately forget her name, and of course the 8 or 9 Polish who were so affectionate for each other and welcoming to me that it really tugged at my heartstrings a little.

I feel like I could write a whole short sroty just about this one night, all the conversations, bridges gapped, spliffs rolled by the Frenchman, the rounds of shots... It was all rather overstimulating for my already boggled senses. I can only hope to stay in touch with at least a few of them (I have my two first foreign facebook friends) and hopefully see them all again when I'm in Dublin in September before I catch my flight from there to Barcelona.

It was an extraordinary introduction to couchsurfing for sure, though I thought it rather amusing that my first night in Ireland I hung out with so many people from all over the world, but not a single Irish person, and also drank not a single pint of Guinness.

A postscript of sorts: I noticed the name on the nose of the plane I boarded to cross the Atlantic to Dublin was named St. Colmcille, the patron saint of Glen Colm Cille in County Donegal, where I stayed with the Ireland Program in 2003. A good omen, I thought.

I'd like to request everyone, the next time they have a drink with their friends, they have a cheer to the Poles!

written by  Dan Schoo on August 13, 2008 from Dublin, Ireland
from the travel blog: A cowboy boot to Europe's ass...
tagged Dublin and PolishPeople
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